—
Court ignored the asshole with the gun behind him because he knew the man was out of the fight for the next few seconds. By grabbing the slide of the weapon, Court had kept it from cycling after it fired. Now there was a spent shell inside the chamber of the Lorcin, and the dude behind him could pull that trigger all damn day and it wouldn’t go bang, not until he racked the slide to eject the spent casing and load a fresh round from the magazine.
And Court didn’t think for an instant he would figure this out for at least a couple of seconds. The attacker was in a fight for his life; his adrenaline would make him spastic and unable to process the flood of information coming his way.
Court had learned long ago that in any gunfight, one does not rise to the occasion. Instead, one defaults to the level of ability he has mastered.
And the asshole with the shitty pistol couldn’t have mastered much of anything involving firearms, otherwise he wouldn’t be carrying such a shitty pistol.
Now Court had time to deal with the stiletto in front of him. The kid jabbed straight out with it, lunging his body with the strike, and Court raised his right arm. The blade stuck into the plaster cast on his forearm, and Court used his left hand to catch the boy’s knife hand in a wristlock, twisting until the knife dropped away. Court continued the backwards twist of the hand, then pushed against the sinews connecting the boy’s upper arm and lower arm together. He wrenched it back at a forty-five-degree angle, cranking the arm awkwardly away from the bend of the elbow joint, spraining the tendons before the boy figured out his only defense to the move was to fall back onto the pavement on his back. He did this, then he rolled around on the cold concrete clutching an elbow that jolted with pain.
Court figured the man behind him would be in the middle of troubleshooting his situation, so he turned back to him. The thin man had his hand on the top of the pistol, and he had just begun racking the slide. The spent casing ejected into the air, but before the slide sprang forward, Court’s left hand shot out again and wrapped around the exposed barrel and the frame, restricting the slide’s progress forward. Court’s thumb pressed on the mag release button now, dropping the magazine full of bullets to the sidewalk.
Court let go of the gun.
—
Marvin retained his grip on the weapon, with his finger on the trigger. Before he understood what was happening he squeezed the trigger, and the striker fired on the empty chamber.
The gun went click again.
Marvin looked up at the white man, his own eyes as wide as saucers now. His “victim” looked back at him, still calm. Almost bored.
Marvin gaped at his empty pistol, and at the magazine on the ground. He did not understand what had just happened, but he was pretty sure his weapon was useless. He had a folding knife in his back pocket, but he wasn’t thinking about it now. In fact, he wouldn’t remember it until much later. For now his mind panicked. He turned and ran—Marvin had been running for his whole life, after all—and he left his teenaged crew behind.
—
Court watched the thin man race off into the mist, then he knelt down over the two injured boys. The teen holding his battered arm was sitting up on the sidewalk, but the kid with the hole in his foot still writhed in pain on the grass.
Their weapons were somewhere in the dark, out of reach.
Court scanned the buildings in all directions, the windows and doorways and driveways he could see through the mist, and while he did so he spoke softly. “Hell of a guy, your fearless leader.”
Neither boy replied; they just both stared in horror at the calm man kneeling over them.
Court waited for some response, but when nothing came, he shrugged. “How much cash you carrying?”
They looked to each other briefly, then back up.
Court sniffed. “How ’bout that? I’m mugging you. The irony, right?”
Court reached out, felt through the clothing worn by the kid with the hole in his foot, and pulled a ten-dollar bill out of his front pocket. The boy with the wounded arm extended a shaking hand holding a wad of crumpled one-dollar bills, and Court stuffed them into the pocket of his jeans.
He then grabbed the first boy’s injured foot and looked at the bloody hole in the top of his white tennis shoe. In a soft voice he said, “That looks worse than it is, so maybe you shouldn’t look at it.” He turned to the kid with the twisted arm and helped him back up to his feet. “You’re okay. That will hurt a few days, tops. Less if you ice it. It’s your job to help him. Take him to a hospital. When you get there tell the cops some dickhead was playing with his gun and it went off. They’ll hassle you, but if you stick with your story, eventually they’ll buy it and move on.”